Hectic preparations were underway at the Diggi Palace Hotel, the Jaipur festival venue, on Thursday.

It takes place against the backdrop of a royal home in Rajasthan, it involves thousands of guests and multiple events that span five days, and lots of chatting, eating, drinking and music. No, it’s not the latest celebrity destination wedding—but the Jaipur Literature Festival, which starts Friday, certainly bears a lot of resemblance to one.

“People across the world have started calling it the great big Indian wedding,” said Sanjoy Roy of Teamwork Productions, the wedding, er, festival planner. “We feed 1,000 people at lunch and 1,000 people at dinner.”

As several folks said about weddings in the disarray ahead of October’s Commonwealth Games in New Delhi—there’s a lot of moments in the last stretch where you wonder if everything will be ready in time.

Less than 24 hours before the 10 a.m. inauguration Friday morning, tent makers were bustling about putting up colorful bunting, other workers were messing around with sound equipment and tables and yet more were whitewashing walls and hammering away loudly at tables for buffet meals.

The organizers and the family that still lives in the stately home that they turned into the Diggi Palace Hotel 20 years ago have had their work cut out for them this year. After two years where the crowds of book lovers—last year about 30,000 people attended—were falling all over each other for standing room at the sessions, they’ve expanded the number and size of the venues.

“Nobody could get in,” said Mr. Roy, explaining that Durbaar Hall, from where portraits of Diggi family ancestors look down on the authors and their audience, only seated about 250 people comfortably.

If you did get a seat at what was previously the main venue for the session, “you came, you sat, you didn’t take a pee break,” he said.

This year, the family-run hotel has managed to create several new venues on its grounds, almost doubling the space allotted to the festival.

Off to the side of the main entranceway, a parking lot and the buildings on it were brought down about four months ago to create a place for live music and for festival delegates to eat lunch. On Thursday, it was still a dirt lawn but rolls of carpet lay nearby waiting to be unfurled over it.

At the back, where new space has been opened up for food stalls and a larger book store, some may notice a whiff of manure. That’s because the spot in question usually houses the Diggi Palace stables. Owner Thakur Ram Pratap Singh’s 21 horses have been temporarily sent away for the occasion, explained his 19-year-old son Rudra Singh, who’ll be handling the bar and food.

They’re probably at the actual Diggi, the family’s former fiefdom approximately 60 kilometers from Jaipur, where they still hold several properties. The family moved to Jaipur almost 300 years ago at the invitation of Maharaja Sawi Jai Singhji II, who was setting up a new capital there.

The displacement of the horses also allowed for a larger Mughal tent that can seat about 1,500. The most packed events meanwhile are set for the front lawns, which can squeeze in about 2,000 people at a time.

Mr. Singh is actively involved in the preparations, pointing out that all the food for the festival guests is grown organically on family farms and prepared at home by his wife and himself. He also keeps a sharp eye out for small details, ordering more port-a-loos this year after remembering long lines at the ladies’ toilets last year.

But will it all be ready in time?

“We had the Commonwealth Games, this is nothing compared to that,” he said with a smile, before hurrying off to take care of something else.

The festival may not involve the same level of spending as some of the most over-the-top Indian weddings—steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal’s daughter’s nuptials reportedly cost over $55 million and had events in the Tuileries and Versailles – but Jaipur still puts a lot of cash into the local economy.

“Every single hotel room in the city is booked,” said Mr. Singh. “What Jaipur gets is huge.”

Mr. Roy estimates that between hotel rooms and the host of services, from tents to printing, that he says they make a point of hiring locally, the festival – sponsored mainly by infrastructure developer DSC Ltd. – easily spends $1 million on the event. And that’s leaving aside what visitors to the city spend.

An auto driver who lives outside Diggi Palace says there’s a lot more work when the festival is on—plus he says it draws some major stars.

“Aamir Khan had come once, also Dev Anand and Amitabh Bachchan,” he said, naming top Bollywood actors of different generations. “Lots of big people come.”

That leaves just one question—if this is a wedding, who’s the pair at the heart of it all?

It just so happens that two of the better-known writers attending—Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk and India’s Kiran Desai—are a literary couple. They both won important awards in 2006—he the literature Nobel and she the Booker—and opened up in 2009 to the press about the fact that they are dating.

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